NEWARK -- Relationships may not be all about looks, but initial attractions are.

That's the underlying theory behind a new dating app - "FaceDate" - a group of students and professors at the New Jersey Institute of Technology are in the midst of developing.

The app uses facial recognition technology to match users with people in their area they might find attractive.

FaceDate users upload photos of themselves and pictures of celebrities or others they think are good looking. The app pairs potential daters who are attracted to each other, based on the appearance data derived from the photos both users uploaded.

Other dating apps on the market are text-based, with matches made according to personality and other information users upload, the creators said. FaceDate's initial pairings are based on photos.

"It's not all about the facial look, but that's the starting point," said Hillol Debnath, one of the Ph.D. students who helped develop the app.

"Once you have a match, you get to know the person" via a messaging platform and additional profile details that couples can see once they've been matched, he said.

Debnath has spent about a year working on the app with fellow Ph.D. students Nafize Paiker and Jianchen Shan, master's student Pradymna Neog, and Professor Cristian Borcea. The group has applied for a patent on the app, and is planning to roll out a test version of it to the NJIT student body soon.

Borcea compared the test run to the way Facebook started, opening the platform at first to Harvard students only. Eventually, he said, the group hopes to form a company, look for investors and offer the app to the public.

Though Borcea said he has never gotten to the point before where a student-developed product was brought to market, he said he has overseen the development of many that would be viable.

"In general, our research is quite practical," he said.

Borcea said FaceDate started with a National Science Foundation grant that had to be used to develop a cloud-based application. After one of the students mentioned a dating app idea, the group fine tuned it, and built the infrastructure.

The app is location-based and focused on privacy. Users can't see other profiles unless both of them have identified appearance preferences that match each other.

If it's rolled out as planned, Borcea said the result will be "the introduction of people who might not have met otherwise, but who would be interested in getting to know one another."